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For Immediate Release

Peabody Museum at Harvard Square's Bookish Ball

(Cambridge, April 12, 2010) How did the ancient Maya create their intricate carvings? How did the Inuit survive in the Arctic before space heaters? Educators and volunteers from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology will be at the Harvard Coop on Saturday, April 17th from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM, as part of the Harvard Square Business Association’s Bookish Ball. There will be plenty of family activities: Games, stories, Maya glyph rubbings, making take-home snow goggles modeled after Inuit technology, writing numbers the way the ancient Maya did, and tasting “Aztec Chocolate” made with the ancient recipe. There will be raffles all afternoon in the store.

Visitors who obtain a Bookish Ball discount flyer at the Harvard Coop get 50% off admission for Saturday, April 17 or Sunday April 18 at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. They may enter to win the raffle grand prize at the Museum: a full year family membership to the Museum (a $60 value).

About the Peabody Museum
Robert Gardner writes, “Fifty years ago, by inaugurating the Film Study Center, the Peabody Museum at Harvard University placed its confidence in the notion that anthropology would benefit from stepping
into a visual world. The center became known for making films such as Dead Birds, Moving Pictures, Nicaragua, The Nuer, and many others, while all the time undertaking still photography as a less central but no less indispensable way to carry out the center’s original purposes. This long time later, it is fitting to acknowledge the role that photography has played in the center’s work during the last half century.”

The Peabody Museum is among the oldest archaeological and ethnographic museums in the world with one of the finest collections of human cultural history found anywhere. It is home to superb materials from Africa, ancient Europe, North America, Mesoamerica, Oceania, and South America in particular. In addition to its archaeological and ethnographic holdings, the Museum’s photographic archives, one of the largest of its kind, hold more than 500,000 historical photographs, dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and chronicling anthropology, archaeology, and world culture.

Hours and location: 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., seven days a week. The Museum is closed on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. Admission is $9 for adults, $7 for students and seniors, $6 for children, 3–18. Free with Harvard ID or Museum membership. The Museum is free to Massachusetts residents Sundays, 9 A.M. to noon, year round, and Wednesdays from 3 P.M. to 5 P.M. (September to May). Admission includes admission to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. For more information call 617-496-1027 or go online to: www.peabody.harvard.edu. The Peabody Museum is located at 11 Divinity Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Museum is a short walk from the Harvard Square MBTA station.